Wil Reynolds held a session at Affiliate Summit East 2012 discussing Google’s recent changes (Panda, Penguin), how to diagnose the problem areas, and how to do real good. His session started with reflecting on the Keynote he gave last year.

Wil was took the stage to some sort of Google theme song… too bad I didn’t Shazam it (is Shazam a verb? Now it is). He immediately brought up Panda, and how much he loves it because crap stopped showing up in results.

Affiliate Summit West 2011 is in the history books (read through my session recaps). This was the first Summit in which I spoke (Datafeeds panel and Inside the Minds of Affiliates) and while I didn’t think it was a big deal, I was relieved when the second panel was finished.

At the Link Building Victories & FailuresAffiliate Summit session, Wil Reynolds explained that authority links aren’t always the answer! In his example, Wil explained how a client of his had numerous authority links (fashion magazine websites) but still was not getting the same rankings as the competition. So Wil and the folks at SEER tried some different techniques.

To start, before you can ask for help, you must offer help. RT others, link to their content, build your Karma bank. Some ways to do this for your niche are twitter searches (search.twitter.com or a column in TweetDeck)